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U.S. men lack creativity on the pitch

Americans missing the big picture -- goals

By John HendersonThe Denver Post

Posted:
03/23/2013 10:55:08 PM MDT

Updated:
03/23/2013 10:55:21 PM MDT

COMMERCE CITY -- The news startled longtime couch potatoes. Fans who envelop themselves in the football-basketball-baseball trifecta on the American sports calendar couldn't believe their eyes when they saw the statistics.

In the state of Washington, youth soccer players outnumbered youth baseball players in a trend experts said would sweep the country. Soccer was the future sport of America. Soon America would be a world soccer power.

That was 1979.

It's nearly a generation later and experts were right -- sort of. More kids play youth soccer (3 million in 2011) than Little League (ages 4-18) baseball (2 million). But the prediction (hope?) that this would translate into painting the global game in stars and stripes has left Nostradamus howling in his grave.

The U.S. men's soccer team has reached the World Cup quarterfinals only once. This country of 314 million is ranked 33rd in the world, one slot behind Hungary (10 million). Only Friday night's 1-0 snowball victory over Costa Rica at Dick's Sporting Goods Park kept the U.S. team out of last place in CONCACAF qualifying for Brazil 2014.

Second-year German coach Jurgen Klinsmann calls this a transitional period for U.S. soccer. He's folding in new talent and ushering out some of the old.

But where are his young phenoms? Where are the players whose posters adorn kids' walls not only in California but in England and Italy?

"We're lacking in the creativity," said Marcelo Balboa, a defender on the U.S.

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team from 1988 to 2000 and an analyst for Colorado Rapids games. "We're lacking in the youth game. We're telling our kids to pass the ball, pass the ball. The most natural thing for a kid to do is dribble.

"If he has that confidence to dribble, you let him dribble."

But why can't Johnny shoot?

In an embarrassing three-games-and-out performance at the 2006 World Cup, U.S. players scored one goal. In reaching the 2010 quarterfinals, they scored five goals in four games but needed a brain lock by goalkeeper Robert Green to tie England 1-1, and needed Landon Donovan's goal in stoppage time to beat Algeria 1-0 and advance.

It's no coincidence that in the past two World Cups, Donovan has scored three of the six goals and Clint Dempsey two. Donovan is the nation's all-time leading scorer with 49. Dempsey -- who, no surprise, has scored the only two goals in two games of this CONCACAF qualifying -- is third with 32.

Not that Donovan's current self-imposed exile was necessary, but he recently spent 10 days in the one place that would get him as far as possible from the burden of carrying U.S. soccer fortunes: Cambodia.

Donovan and Dempsey could use some help. Where is it?

"I don't know if we don't have those big-time strikers, because we do," Balboa said. "Now how do you translate that from a club team to a national team?"

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